Is this not a serious wake up call for all these companies relying on Chromium? You are staking so much of your business on a giant conglomerate that does not care about you or your users, whose only aim to sweep up as much data from the web as possible to feed their ad machine.
Just right now, they prefer to not have to pay for 1000+ engineers to work on the codebase to keep up with the pace that Google manages.
Maybe it should at the very least be a wake up call to companies which can't afford the engineer-hours it takes to maintain a Chromium fork.
They don't need to keep pace feature-wise. I don't need a featureful browser, I want a browser that performs well.
Last I looked into it; the problem wasnt with features. The Chrome code base is very dynamic and if you fall behind then it becomes very hard to pull upstream patches due to the pace at which things get refactored.
And remember some people might be working on experiments/research/ideas that never make it into the repo.
And there are lots of libraries in other repos that kinda only exist for Chromium that Google also works on - eg. the Skia graphics library.
But... on top of those engineers will be UX designers, managers, HR, finance, chefs, and all the other people who make an organisation work.
I think 1000 is a good guess - maybe even 2000.
Even easier if there's a shared open source fork. My company did it with 2 people
Absent security issues, what's the value of the last N releases of Chrome? How far do you have to go to get something of value that changed?
Serious question, because I'm not on the cutting edge of browser technology. From a step away, it seems like it's been fairly stable.
IMO something of value changes with every release. For example, in the most recent release (105) Chromium gained support for container queries and the :has() pseudo-class. Container queries allow web devs to change how styling is applied the contents of an element based on the size of the element itself. That's a major new tool for web developers & designers. 105 also supports the HTML Sanitizer API, which relieves the need to use libraries like DomPurify to protect against XSS attacks.
If you're interested in digging into what changes in each release, Chrome has a blog post series called New in Chrome[1] that summarizes changes. And to dive even further into changes, the Chrome Status[2] site allows you to filter platform feature changes by release milestone.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/tags/new-in-chrome/ [2]: https://chromestatus.com/features#milestone%3D104
They should fork Chromium and sign up all the others (Brave, Vivaldi, Opera) to help maintain the code base. Of course MS can afford to pitch in the maximum amount of resources, both human and financial.
This way we will have a serious contender to Chrome in the industry and they can differentiate themselves meaningfully from Google's hegemony in the space.
But they won't do it, it's hard to ignore those sweet potential ad monies.
Microsoft already did that. Edge uses Microsoft’s fork of Chromium.
Source: https://textslashplain.com/2022/08/04/understanding-browser-...
Microsoft have their own branch, where they add Edge-specific changes, and they regularly pull changes from the Chromium source (probably not all changes) and merge them to their branch. If you don’t consider this a fork, then please explain why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)
>Eric S. Raymond, in his essay Homesteading the Noosphere,[12] stated that "The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community"
At this point I just want to add that I'm not a developer and I don't actually know much, I just read stuff online. But yeah, Edge isn't a fork
> Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch".[14] With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git, the normal way to contribute to a project, is to first create a personal branch of the repository, independent of the main repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with it. Sites such as GitHub, Bitbucket and Launchpad provide free DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that the technical, social and financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced, and GitHub uses "fork" as its term for this method of contribution to a project.
On GitHub, if you fork somebody else’s repo, your version is called a fork. You don’t have to diverge. You don’t have to merge. You don’t have to do anything, but it’s still called a fork. Do you agree that this is how GitHub uses the term fork?
If you're going to sell me a Chrome ripoff, I'll just use the real deal. It's the same reason why Firefox died: They tried/try to ripoff Chrome, and as a result everyone just moved/moves over to the real deal.
I'm using Firefox specifically for a number of features chrome does not have.
Firefox is (and has been) no longer a consideration in web development because of its tiny and thus inconsequential market share.
Lest we forget, Firefox was once the market leader that usurped the position from IE6.
>they tried to rip off Chrome
The constant dumbing down and changing of the UI, removal of XUL in favor of WebAssembly (dropping Firefox extensions in favor of becoming compatible with Chrome extensions), moving to the Chrome Version Number system (we're on Firefox what again? 100? 150? 200?) to not look ancient comparatively, etc.
I'm sincerely of the opinion Mozilla should just drop Gecko and move Firefox over to being another Chrome fork. It would be far more in line with Mozilla's goals of shipping a Chrome ripoff in vain attempts to steal Chrome users.
Is 7.4% of desktop users [0] inconsequential? Maybe to your business, but I think most would be sad to lose 7% of desktop users. I'll also note if this indicates "death" Safari is dead too.
I know XUL pissed off a lot of people, but I really don't think copying Chrome was the main motivation. XUL had a LOT of cruft and issues they wanted to escape and going to web extensions for some level of interoperability made sense, and looking at data from around that time [1] it doesn't appear to have cost them much of their user-base. It's also a perfect example of Firefox not copying Chrome, with Firefox supporting a ton of APIs Chrome doesn't or has removed [2].
As for the UI "copying" Chrome, I'm not sure how to respond to that. I just spun up vanilla profiles of Firefox and Chrome, and sure they both have tabs at the top, but they are pretty visually distinct. Yes Firefox has reduced the size of it's UI over the years, but if that's copying Chrome... I guess a lot of apps are.
Firefox may be in decline, and that makes me sad, but I think that has a lot more to do with shitty developers using non-standard Chrome APIs and then telling users to use Chrome when it breaks, while GMail and other Google properties cripple Firefox performance, rather than Firefox blindly copying Chrome.
Personally I hope this trend reverses. Firefox is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next IE 6.
[0] - https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
[1] - https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
[2] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
Nobody with a sane mind is going to bother spending time and resources on just 7.4% of the userbase, that's just a simple and brutal fact of reality.
I do think Safari is "dead" as a browser, it's not Chrome after all. But it's not dead dead yet, and the only reason for that is because it's the only browser on iOS which itself holds a significant minority share of the mobile space. Webdevs will support Safari not because Safari is worth paying attention to, but because iOS and its ~45%(?) market share is worth paying attention to.
>Personally I hope this trend reverses. Firefox is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next IE 6.
I argue Chrome is already the second coming of IE6, and we've yet to see the second coming of Firefox. And whatever the second of coming of Firefox is, it's almost certainly not going to be anything to do with Mozilla.
I currently use Brave, but if they switched to using Quantum I personally would just switch to Firefox proper.